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eIFL: Towards the federation of
repositories
S VeldsmaneIFL Content
Manager
Overview of presentation
• eIFL Background• What have we done so far?• Federated repository portal• Few challenges
eIFL Background
• electronic Information For Libraries (eIFL)• Established in 1999, registered in 2003• Funded by the Open Society Institute, and other
funders• Registered in the Netherlands as a non-for-profit
organisation, operational seat based in Rome• This global network embraces nearly 2200 libraries,
50 countries in developing world, and millions of users in Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe and the Middle East.
• Ultimate vision: “Access to knowledge”
eIFL Programmes
• Negotiation of e-resources with publishers• Library consortium building and development• Advocacy for and capacity building in copyright• Open Access awareness raising and advocacy• Advocacy for and implementation of Open Source
Software in libraries• Knowledge sharing
What have we done so far?
• Advocacy and Training in OA and IR issues: – China, Syria, Bulgaria, Lithuania– Ghana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe– South Africa : 2004, 2005 qnd 2006 – Carnegie Research Library Consortium(South Africa)2007
• Hands-on-training in how to set up IR’s– South Africa (all institutions)
• Digital library training-hands-on– Greenstone: Namibia, Lesotho, Malawi, Zimbabwe
- Conferences:OAI5, SARUA• Growing IRs in eIFL member countries:
– 2006: 64 (25 in progress)– 2007:96 (27 in progress)
Country Number of repositories within the countries
Azerbaijan 1
Belarus 6
Bulgaria 2
China 12
Estonia 3
Jordan 1
Kyrgystan 1
Latvia 1
Lithuania 1
Mongolia 2
Namibia 1
Poland 23
Russia 7
South Africa 10
Senegal 1
Serbia 6
Slovenia 2
Uganda 2
Ukraine 9
Zimbabwe 1
Total institutional repositories 96
What have we done so far?(2)• Create more visibility
– OAIster• 2006:16• 2007:30
– OpenDoar• 2006:21• 2007:38
– Google– Federating repositories?
How did eIFL do it?
• SURF/CQ2- Driver• 15 countries , 59 repositories• 80 343 items retrieved• Sahara (Open Source Harvester)• Lucene( Open Source Indexer)• Existing DRIVER platform and software• Pilot project
Statistics so far: Nov 2007-Jan 2008
• Usage– No of visits: 480– Pages:1450– Hits: 5064
• Countries– USA, SA, Kenya, Botswana, Australia, Europe
• Bots:– MSN,Google and Yahoo
• Hosts, connecting sites
What problems did we incur when harvesting?
• Base URLs• Not OAI-PMH compliant• Contacts on institutional level• Lack of knowledge
Objectives of initiative
• Tool/demonstrator• infrastructure for countries• visibility of scholarly publications in the developing world• trans -national co-operation and community building• raising the awareness on the importance of standards, adding
of full text within repositories and training• possible participation and co-operation opportunities in
international projects e.g. DRIVER• motivation to countries to set up repositories (encourage
competition)
What are the challenges?
• further increase visibility of repositories (move from repository to portal level)
• refining of regional subsets• To set up more IRs within eIFL countries• Human resources (capacity) and knowledge• Bandwidth, availability of computers, connectivity• How to identify champs?• IR’s are not just about e-thesis and dissertations,
move beyond it
What are the challenges(2)
• set up of standards and guidelines to ensure high quality metadata for international harvesting purposes
• how to make current IRs OAI-PMH compliant• Training, training, training!• Move from country coordinator level to
institutional level• Look for partnerships
Decisions on the way forward
• Board meeting-next week– Maintain service as is,provision of funding to
maintain, develop and host of portal– Deeper level of service provision, explore
technical possibilities e.g. more search functionality, OAI-PMH base URL assigned to portal,
What can eIFL offer?
• Best practices• Collaboration• Communities of developing countries• Contacts• Information on developing countries• Experiences
